Rebekah Modrak co-organized and spoke at Stop Pro­tect­ing Preda­tors: Sur­vivors Speak Up,  a forum addressing U-M’s fail­ures in pre­vent­ing and respond­ing to sex­ual mis­con­duct on cam­pus. The event on Sat­ur­day, Novem­ber 13, from 11 am to 1 pm centered around two panels: The first featured six sur­vivors of sex­ual mis­con­duct at U-M (Isabelle Brourman, Maya Crosman, Katherine McMahan, Jon Vaughn, Tad DeLuca and Chuck Christian), coming together to share experiences and describe the fail­ures of the uni­ver­sity in pro­tect­ing vic­tims, in their own words. In the second panel,  Modrak and other pol­icy-advo­cates described U‑M’s cur­rent sex­ual mis­con­duct poli­cies and what changes should be made to pro­tect the U‑M com­mu­nity, and to cen­ter the voices of sur­vivors.  The Michi­gan Daily cov­ered the event.

A recording of the event is available on YouTube.

Additional information about these cases:

Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan lec­turer Bruce Con­forth was per­mit­ted to con­tinue teach­ing after a stu­dent filed a sex­ual harass­ment report in 2008. Eight years and seven vic­tims later, the Uni­ver­sity encour­aged Con­forth to retire, pre-empt­ing a full review into sev­eral new reports against him. Another sex­ual mis­con­duct case on U‑M’s cam­pus, involv­ing Dr. Robert Ander­son, may be the largest sex­ual vio­lence case in America’s his­tory with a reported 2100+ vic­tims; the Uni­ver­sity knew of the U‑M ath­letic doctor’s sex­ual mis­con­duct since the 1970s, but allowed Ander­son to work and abuse stu­dents until his retire­ment in 2003. There are addi­tional sto­ries of abuse beyond those of Con­forth and Ander­son. For, despite the Uni­ver­sity hail­ing them­selves as rad­i­cally improv­ing sex­ual mis­con­duct poli­cies, the admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues to fail to pro­vide action­able pro­ce­dures to pro­tect vic­tims, pros­e­cute preda­tors, and pre­vent future mis­con­duct at U‑M.

Rebekah Modrak was selected as the Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities for the 2021-22 academic year. The Institute promotes interdisciplinary research and discourse in the humanities and the arts. The central function of the institute is to form an intellectual community of faculty and graduate student fellows who spend an academic year in residence in the institute, pursuing their research and participating in a cross-disciplinary, weekly seminar.

Throughout the year, Rebekah is working with Italy-based collaborator and curator Marialaura Ghidini to create an extensive net-based artwork challenging the logic of current digital technologies that preference productivity and efficiency over our human nature to be complicated and contradictory. Titled UnProductiveSolutions (UnPro), the artwork presents as a “company” whose mission is to disrupt and challenge assumptions of existing technologies. UnPro will find form as a company website of imagined e-products. Ultimately, UnPro asks: what would technology look like if it supported our right to “complex personhood.” 

 

Thrilled to share that the Boston Review has published an essay from the book Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts, (Rebekah Modrak and Jamie Vander Broek, editors). The essay “Against Persuasion” by Agnes Callard (Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago) explores the value of being inquisitive and the collaborative nature of knowledge through Socrates’ conversations with other people who claimed to have knowledge. Radical Humility was published by Belt Publishing in March 2021. In the book, Callard’s essay appears as “Loving Knowledge Together: Socratic Humility.”

Radical Humility is a collection of essays by philosophers, artists, a lawyer, a journalist, a cook, a columnist, psychologists, educators, consumer culture and race scholars, and others about the value of humility, and the harms of arrogance, from personal, political, and institutional perspectives.

Rebekah Modrak is the recipient of an Arts Integrative Faculty Research Grant from ArtsEngine for her and collaborator Marialaura Ghidini’s project, UnProductive Solutions. Arts Integrative Interdisciplinary Faculty Research Grants support faculty research projects that integrate the arts or design with other disciplines, especially those in engineering and the sciences. UnProductiveSolutions is an extensive net-based artwork challenging the logic of current digital technologies that preference productivity and efficiency at the expense of encouraging humans to be complicated and contradictory. This project considers technology from the perspectives of sociology, critical digital studies, psychology, economics, information and digital studies, and the care industry, among other disciplines.

Rebekah Mod­rak part­nered with Roland L. Leak, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Mar­ket­ing in the Col­lege of Busi­ness and Eco­nom­ics at North Car­olina A&T State Uni­ver­sity to curate a series of essays on ​“The Inter­sec­tion of Power, Race, and Com­merce” for Spark mag­a­zine, a pub­li­ca­tion of the National Cen­ter for Insti­tu­tional Diver­sity (NCID). The series was pub­lished on June 3, 2021.

The series con­tains a col­lec­tion of five invited sub­mis­sions from diver­sity schol­ars whose schol­ar­ship speaks to the rela­tion­ships between com­merce, power, and race in light of shift­ing opin­ions and epipha­nies about racial jus­tice, in the wake of mas­sive racial protests over the past year. Essays sur­vey the impact of white­ness and white man­age­ment on sports cul­ture; ques­tion whether pro­gres­sive rep­re­sen­ta­tions in Nike ads actu­ally trans­lates into racial jus­tice; cri­tique the ways that uni­ver­si­ties’ exhi­bi­tions of diver­sity in their mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als mis­leads prospec­tive stu­dents into think­ing that an aspi­ra­tional iden­tity has already been achieved; exam­ine the his­tory of Wedg­wood dec­o­ra­tive porce­lain being founded on a sin­gu­lar act of loot­ing ​“White Earth” from South Car­olina Chero­kees; and ana­lyze adver­tis­ers’ use of skin as a com­mod­ity, sig­nal of brand mean­ing, and sub­ject of fetishism.

Silke-Maria Weineck, professor of Germanic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, and I devised an intervention renaming Weiser Hall the “Weiser Center for Voter Suppression, Political Assassination, and Witch Burning.”

On Saturday, April 3, 3pm,  we invited faculty, staff and students for a ceremonial renaming service. The building’s new name became visible as free-standing identification signs in PMS 282 blue at the east and west sides of the building, as well as in stenciled lettering, collectively sprayed by students and faculty, on the southern promenade and surrounding grounds of the building.

In an ideal world, we would name our buildings after individuals who represent the public values of our institution and the diversity of our community.  Ronald Weiser’s attempts to suppress the vote, and his recent comments that three female elected officials are “witches” to be “burned at the stake” and that those (shockingly few) Republicans who refused to support the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 should be “assassinated,” disqualify him from this honor. We created this action to urge the university to quickly begin the process of removing Weiser’s name from all university-affiliated buildings and institutions, as no member of our community should be forced into symbolic association with a man who advocates misogyny, violence, and anti-democratic intent.

Literati Bookstore hosts Radical Humility. Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 7-8pm.
Link to event at Literati Bookstore.

Join us virtually to celebrate the publication of Radical Humility: Essays on Ordinary Acts (edited by Rebekah Modrak and Jamie Vander Broek), a collection of essays considering the value of humility in an age of golden escalators and billionaire entrepreneurs. Readings by contributors Ruth Nicole Brown (artist-scholar whose life work is dedicated to the celebration of Black girlhood), Lynette Clemetson (longtime journalist and director of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships at the U. of Michigan), Mickey Duzyj (creator/director of the Netflix documentary series Losers), and Jennifer Cole Wright (a psychologist-scholar who studies why we care about being “good people” and how we become them).

Rebekah Modrak’s latest essay ““My Work is Yours to Do What I Want” was published in “Forking Paths in New Media Art Practices: Investigating Remix,” a special issue for Media-N, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal from the New Media Caucus, dedicated to critical dialogue on new media art. This special issue of Media-N on contemporary approaches to remix was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a recurring point of reference in the development of media culture. Borges’s narrative exploration of remix was a means of reflecting on the possibility of multiple simultaneous realities with no clear beginning or end. His imaginings offered a literary and philosophical model for creative uses of emerging technology throughout the twentieth century.

“My Work is Yours to Do What I Want” relies on remix to tell the story of Peter Buchanan-Smith and Peter Smith-Buchanan. In this truthful story that often reads as fiction, a cast of characters, including wagyu beef, Professor Skiller’s forgotten payment, and the law firm of Ellenoff Grossman & Schole LLP, are entwined in acts of manipulation, machismo, and disturbances of consumer culture.

Rebekah Modrak was invited to exhibit at the Weserburg Museum in Bremen, Germany in the exhibition Künstlerpublikationen: analog – digital!.

The exhibition, curated by Peter Sämann of the Research Association for Artist Publications and Anne Thurmann-Jajes, director of the Centre for Artists’ Publications, is about artworks using digital methods of production, presentation, and distribution. The show consists of both purely digital works and works that appear both as real objects and in electronic form.

The digital forms of artists’ artworks include digital artists’ books and newspapers, social media and e-mails, multimedia editions, as well as works of net art and ASCII art.

Other participating artists include Heman Chong, Jean-François Guiton, Jenny Holzer, Miroslav Klivar, Frieder Nake, Lim Shengen, Jan van der Til, Timm Ulrichs.

 

Rebekah Modrak and curator Marialaura Ghidini’s work #exstrange was featured in ANYWHERE iii, a book featuring contributions from artists participating in Anywhere and Elsewhere: Art at The Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity. The book, edited by Sean Lowry (Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne) and Simone Douglas (Professor, Parsons, The New School) explores a broad range of questions associated with presenting, experiencing, discussing and evaluating art located anywhere and elsewhere in space and time.

ANYWHERE iii was published by Centre of Visual Art, University of Melbourne; School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY; and Project Anywhere.

Other artists/artworks featured in the book include Benjamin Matthews’ New Hypothetical Continents, Ana Mendes’ On Drawing, Jacob Olmedo’s And The World Will Be As One, Macushla Robinson’s In the Wake of Museul Whiteness, and Ryota Sato’s Matsushima Bunko Museum.